Courtyard with Painters (late 1860s): Art, History and Details

Courtyard with Painters (late 1860s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This photographer inventively expanded the medium to create a rare example of both early genre (everyday life) photography and documentation of artists at work. The collodion negative captured a wealth of detail. The French village courtyard bustles with activity-the artist in the foreground hugs a squirming child and chats with his wife; a group of peasant women in the background heave huge bundles of laundry about in carts and baskets; and an innkeeper poses proudly for the camera outside his ivy-covered establishment. The diagonals of the sloping roofs and the textures of tiles, wood, and stone enhance the composition's visual interest. A luminous glow, absorbed by open canvas umbrellas, pervades the center of the scene.

Object facts

• Title: Courtyard with Painters
• Date: late 1860s
• Culture: France(?)
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: albumen print from wet collodion negative
• Dimensions: Image: 28.4 x 38.6 cm (11 3/16 x 15 3/16 in.); Matted: 50.8 x 61 cm (20 x 24 in.)
• Collection: PH - French 19th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 1998.176

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art, “New Cleveland Indian Arrives at the CMA,” November 27, 1998, Cleveland Museum of Art Archives.
• Hinson, Tom E. "Remembrance of Things Past." Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 49, no. 9 (November 2009): 3-5.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.